There was a time when Zeila was one of the most important cities on the Red Sea. Gold, ivory, hides and slaves from the Ethiopian and Somali interior left through its port, and cloth and ceramics from India and Arabia came in. It was the sea outlet of the Ifat sultanate and later of Adal, an essential stopover for pilgrims heading to Mecca and home to a school of Islamic jurists whose members, the al-Zayla'i, studied in Cairo, Damascus and Zabid. Ibn Battuta passed through in 1331 and wrote of a large city with bustling markets.
Today it's a town of a few thousand people on a spit of sand, in the most remote corner of Somaliland, half an hour from the border with Djibouti. What survives of that past is open-air ruins: centuries-old mosques, among them the Masjid al-Qiblatayn with its two mihrabs, coral-stone tombs, the remains of merchants' houses and a fishing port where a handful of boats tie up.
The surroundings are something else again: mangroves, salt flats, reefs and the Sa'ad ad-Din archipelago, a cluster of sand and coral islands with seabird colonies and clear water. Getting to Zeila is difficult, uncomfortable and hot, and nothing here was built with you in mind. It is also one of the strangest and most powerful experiences you can have in the Horn of Africa: a capital of medieval trade turned fishing village, with desert on one side and the Gulf of Aden on the other.
Zeila already appears in 9th-century Arabic sources as an independent port exporting hides, incense and ambergris. By the 13th century it was a fully established Muslim city, a stopover for pilgrims heading to the Hejaz and home to a notable community of Islamic jurists. It was the sea outlet of the Ifat sultanate, ruled by the Walashma dynasty. After Ifat declined, around 1409-1415, Zeila became part of the Adal sultanate. The nearby archipelago is named after Sultan Sa'ad ad-Din II, who died on those islands fighting Ethiopian forces. In the 16th century, when Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (Ahmed Gurey) launched his campaign against the Ethiopian Empire, the Ottoman artillery that changed the course of that war came in through Zeila. The city later suffered Portuguese attacks in 1517 and 1528 and came under Ottoman administration; in 1672 Evliya Çelebi described it as a fortified town with a garrison and trade with India. Around 1695 it passed to the Qasimi of Mocha, and in the mid-19th century it was governed by Haji Ali Sharmarke. The Khedivate of Egypt occupied it in the 1870s as it pushed towards Harar, and after the Egyptian withdrawal in 1884 it came under the British Somaliland protectorate. The final blow came indirectly. The building of the Djibouti–Addis Ababa railway diverted all the trade of the Ethiopian interior to the French port, and Zeila faded away.
Read the full history ↓From the Gulf of Aden to the 2,400 metres of Cal Madow: ports that appear in the Greek Periplus, Zeila's mosque of the two qiblas, an airstrip built by the Soviets and the world's last great frankincense forest.
Read the history of Somaliland: the coast and the northern mountains →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written around the 1st century AD by a Greek merchant from Egypt, is the first detailed catalogue of the ports of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Among them it mentions Avalites, an anchorage on the African coast where ships loaded frankincense, myrrh, ivory, tortoiseshell and aromatics in exchange for glass, textiles, iron and wine. Identifying Avalites with Zeila is the most widely accepted view, though not a unanimous one.
What made the place valuable was its position. Zeila sits at the western end of the Gulf of Aden, almost at the mouth of the Bab el-Mandeb strait, on a tongue of sand surrounded by sea, with a sheltered anchorage, mangroves and an archipelago that offered extra protection. Above all, it lay at the natural outlet of the routes coming down from the Ethiopian highlands and the Somali interior, laden with gold, ivory, hides, coffee, slaves and aromatics.
Over the centuries of Indian Ocean trade, that combination — a safe anchorage plus access to the interior — was what built cities. Zeila was one of the first in the Horn of Africa, and one of the longest-lasting.
Islam reached this coast very early. Tradition links the region to the first hijra, the migration of a group of Muhammad's followers to the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia around 615, and to the first Muslim communities on the African continent. Building on that, 9th-century Arabic sources already describe Zeila as an independent port exporting hides, frankincense and ambergris; the geographer Al-Yaqubi, at the end of that century, records the presence of Muslims along the northern Somali coast.
By the 13th century, Zeila was an established Muslim city and a key hub of the pilgrimage: pilgrims from the Horn of Africa and the Ethiopian interior embarked there for the Hejaz on their way to Mecca. That traffic connected it to the world of Islamic learning. The city produced a community of scholars known by the nisba "al-Zayla'i" — the one from Zeila — who studied in Egypt, Yemen and Syria and came back with the jurisprudence and theology of the central Islamic world. One of them, Fakhr al-Din al-Zayla'i, wrote a Hanafi legal commentary that is still cited today.
Ibn Battuta, the great Moroccan traveller, landed in Zeila in 1331 and described it as a large city with bustling markets and intense commercial activity — although he also left a rather unflattering remark about its smell, which he put down to fish and the blood of slaughtered camels. In the early 16th century, European accounts speak of its stone buildings and of a lively trade in gold, ivory and textiles with Indian merchants.
The Zeila of those centuries was, in the words of the sources, a multicultural metropolis: mostly Somali, alongside Afar, Harari, Arabs and Persians. An Indian Ocean port city, with everything that implied.
Zeila was not just a port: it was the sea outlet of the great Muslim states of the medieval Horn of Africa. By the 9th century it already appears as the centre of the kingdom of Adal, and later it was the maritime gateway of the Sultanate of Ifat, ruled by the Walashma dynasty, which controlled the route between the Ethiopian highlands and the coast. Ifat fought a long conflict with the Christian Ethiopian Empire for control of those routes.
The decline of the Walashma, around 1409-1415, marked the city's passage into the orbit of the Adal Sultanate. One episode of that transition left its name on the map: Sultan Sa'ad ad-Din II died during the Ethiopian offensive on the islands off the coast, which have been called the Sa'ad ad-Din archipelago ever since and are still Zeila's seascape.
The 16th century brought the most famous episode. Between 1529 and 1543, Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi — known as Ahmed Gurey in Somali and Gragn in Amharic — launched a campaign from Adal that came close to destroying the Ethiopian Empire. The military key was gunpowder: the Ottoman cannons and arquebuses that allowed him to defeat the Ethiopian armies came in through Zeila. The war ended with the imam's death in 1543, after Portugal intervened on the Ethiopian side, and left both sides devastated.
Zeila paid its share. The Portuguese, enemies of Adal and of Muslim trade in the Red Sea, attacked and sacked the city in 1517 and again in 1528. The golden age was starting to close.
After the wars of the 16th century, Zeila entered the long Ottoman orbit. By the 1670s it was administered by the Ottoman Habesh Eyalet, and the traveller Evliya Çelebi described it in 1672 as a fortified town with a garrison of seven hundred men and significant trade with India. Around 1695, control passed to the Qasimi dynasty of Mocha, in Yemen, which used it as a trading post and also as a political prison.
In the 19th century the city had one last moment in the spotlight under Haji Ali Sharmarke, who governed it from 1848 until he was deposed in 1855. In 1854, the British explorer Richard Burton passed through Zeila before his famous entry into Harar and recorded a population of three to four thousand, six mosques and some twenty trading dhows: a city still alive, though far from its heyday.
In the 1870s, the Khedivate of Egypt occupied Zeila as part of its push along the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa towards Harar. The Egyptian venture ended with the financial crisis in Cairo and the Mahdist revolt, and in 1884 the troops withdrew. That same year, and under the Anglo-French agreement of 1888, Zeila became part of the British Somaliland protectorate.
The final blow, however, came not from a war or an empire but from a railway. In the early 20th century, France built the railway linking the port of Djibouti with Addis Ababa. All the trade from the Ethiopian interior that for a thousand years had come down to the coast through Zeila now travelled by train to the French port. The city was left without a purpose, and the British protectorate — a bare-minimum colony, with no investment and no development plan — let it fade away.
Zeila's most remarkable monument is a partly ruined mosque with an extraordinary feature: two mihrabs, two prayer niches, facing different directions. One points towards Mecca; the other, towards Jerusalem. This is the Masjid al-Qiblatayn, the mosque of the two qiblas.
The explanation lies in the first years of Islam. For a time, Muslims prayed facing Jerusalem; the change of prayer direction towards Mecca happened in Medina, in the second year of the hijra. A mosque with both orientations suggests a building from that early period, or a memory very close to it: local tradition and several sources link the building to the 7th century, shortly after the hijra to Abyssinia, which would place it among the oldest mosques in Africa. The site also holds the tomb of a local religious figure, Sheikh Babu Dena.
The Masjid al-Qiblatayn is not alone. Archaeological surveys in Zeila have documented at least three medieval mosques — including the Shahari, with its tall minaret, and the Mahmud Asiri — the mausoleum of Sheikh Ibrahim, coral limestone tombs and Islamic pottery spanning the 13th to the 18th century. Taken together, it is one of the most important Islamic heritage landscapes in the Horn of Africa.
And it is falling down. Around 2016, one of the qibla walls of the Masjid al-Qiblatayn reportedly collapsed, leaving the other wall and a minaret standing. The cause is cumulative: centuries of neglect, salt, sea humidity, wind, lack of maintenance and a complete absence of any protection framework. As with Laas Geel and all the territory's heritage, Somaliland cannot submit nominations to UNESCO because it is not recognised as a state, so these monuments remain outside the international conservation system. What there is: an Archaeology Department with scarce resources, occasional bilateral cooperation and the informal watchfulness of the community.
Present-day Zeila is a small, remote town in the Awdal region, in the far northwest of Somaliland, with about 18,600 inhabitants according to the 2012 census and an economy based on fishing and cross-border trade with Djibouti, just over thirty kilometres away. It is mainly inhabited by Gadabuursi and Issa communities, subclans of the Dir family.
What surrounds it is remarkable. Off the coast lies the Sa'ad ad-Din archipelago, a handful of low, uninhabited sand and coral islands with healthy reefs, clear water and seabird colonies. On land there are mangroves, salt marshes and salt flats that support surprising wildlife in the middle of a desert: flamingos, herons, plovers and migratory waders arriving from the Palearctic in the cool season. Inland, the desert stretches unbroken for dozens of kilometres.
For the traveller, Zeila is equal parts difficult and extraordinary. There is no museum, no signage, no professional guides, no decent hotels, no medical care and no regular transport. There are open-air ruins spanning a thousand years of history, beaches with nobody on them, a fishing port and considerable heat. It is probably one of the last great historic ports of the Indian Ocean that you can explore without running into another visitor.
